The man that walked on water...

A conventionally-minded dervish, from an austerely pious school, was
walking one day along a river bank. He was absorbed in concentration
upon moralistic and scholastic problems, for this was the form which
Sufi teaching had taken in the community to which he belonged. He
equated emotional religion with the search for ultimate truth.

Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a loud shout: someone
was repeating the dervish call. "There is no point in that," he said
to himself, "because the man is mispronoucing the syllables. Instead
of intoning YA HU, he is saying U YA HU."

The he realized that he had a duty, as a more careful student,
to correct this unfortunate person, who might have had no opportunity
of being rightly guided, and was therefore probably only doing his
best to attune himself with the idea behind the sounds.
So he hired a boat and made his way to the island in midstream
from which the sound appeared to come.

Sitting in a reed hut he found a man, dressed in a dervish robe,
moving in time to his own repetition of the initiatory phrase. "My
friend," said the first dervish, "you are mispronoucing the phrase.
It is incumbent upon me to tell you this, because there is merit for
him who gives and him who takes advice. This is the way in which you
speak it." And he told him.
"Thank you," said the other dervish humbly.

The first dervish entered his boat again, full of satisfaction
at having done a good deed. After all, it was said that a man who
could repeat the sacred formula correctly could even walk upon the
waves: something that he had never seen, but always hoped--for some
reason--to be able to achieve.

Now he could hear nothing from the reed hut, but he was sure
that his lesson had been well taken.
Then he heard a faltering U YA HU as the second dervish started
to repeat the phrase in his old way...

While the first dervish was thinking about this, reflecting upon
the perversity of humanity and its persistence in error, he suddenly
saw a strange sight. From the island the other dervish was coming
towards him, walking on the surface of the water...

Amazed, he stopped rowing. The second dervish walked up to him
and said: "Brother, I am sorry to trouble you, but I have to come out
to ask you again the standard method of making the repetition you
were telling me, because I find it difficult to remember ."

as collected by Idries Shah